"Windows is indeed slower than other operating systems in many scenarios, and the gap is worsening." That's one way to start an insider explanation of why Windows' performance isn't up to snuff. Written by someone who actually contributes code to the Windows NT kernel, the comment on Hacker News, later deleted but reposted with permission on Marc Bevand's blog, paints a very dreary picture of the state of Windows development. The root issue? Think of how Linux is developed, and you'll know the answer.

This is bullshit. You can just as easily generate a checksum from text and be just as secure. There's no reason to not have plain text logs; especially considering that binary logs require special tools to read and filter.

If you're creating a checksum from a text file that is already compromised, it doesn't get you very far.

The systemd journal comes from such a tool, and others can be easily created. Another added bonus though is that logs can be handled in one place from the entire network remotely and in a secure manner, and still the information is retained as to where it came from. People have done similar with syslog but it is a mess, this comes by default with systemd and makes sense considering most Linux deployments are cluster-based.

I do not understand what the problem is with binary log files, with journalctl they are just as accessible as using cat but it is more logical, each cgroup keeps its logs together in an orderly way, rather than each process randomly farting info to the file. Further, all the logging systems used around Linux are all read by journald, rather than having the possibility of what you need being in any of 10 files at times.

If you really want though, there is no problem with using journal and syslog on the same system if you absolutely need logs in text files. The journal is not a good enough reason to not use systemd. You gain far more in a far cleaner way by utilizing systemd.